Are You Tired Of Windows Spying On You?

well it's a new year and what better way to break in the new year than to stop your computer from spying on you so that's what we're doing today stay tuned did you know that from the second you turn your computer on big Tech is spying on you it's kind of creepy I mean when your neighbor does it with a pair of binoculars you're probably going to call the cops and no one would blame you either so why do we accept it when it comes from Big Tech and what are they doing it in the first place well the answer to that question is money believe it or not your data is valuable advertisers purchase it so they can know the best way to advertise to you yeah the government also purchases it which is a whole another level of creepiness you may have heard people say that if you're not doing anything wrong you shouldn't be worried about it yeah that might be true but I still don't want law enforcement following me when I'm late for an appointment and I definitely don't want them to have unfeathered access to my personal data want to talk you downtown Rees where you Waring at so either way today I'm going to show you how to limit what they get but first I got to pay some bills so check out today's sponsor is your copy of Windows 10 unactivated well it doesn't have to be because with today's sponsor vipd key you can get a valid Windows 10 license for under $20 stop dealing with that stupid watermark on the desktop the valid license for Windows 10 also with an activated copy of Windows 10 you can upgrade to Windows 11 for free just go to the link in the description below and pick up a valid Windows 10 license key during checkout use the code cyber CPU for a 25% discount once you have your key go to your activation settings in Windows 10 and click on the link that says change product key enter the product key you just purchased and hit activate now you don't have to deal with that stupid Watermark that come with running and unactivated copy of Windows 10 now on with the video so we all know that Windows spies on us in fact big Tech probably knows more about you than your spouse knows about you if you're not married then just replace spouse with whoever your closest friend or relative is the way they do this though is by watching pretty much everything you do on your computer and if you carry a cell phone around then you're pretty much carrying a tracking device in your pocket that has the ability to listen to you unfortunately today we're really only going to be concentrating on Windows however Windows is not the only Vector in which big Tech collects Telemetry on you in fact you're watching this video on YouTube and probably in Chrome considering that it's the most popular browser on the market and you know that's spying on you too I typically get a lot of comments from people claiming that everyone should switch to Linux because Windows just spies on you but then most of these same people are on YouTube with chrome in Linux which probably collects more data than Windows does but I digress but on a positive note it was comments like that that gave me this video idea so hopefully we can make Windows as private as Linux at least close today we're going to tighten up the Windows operating system so it can't get data from you at least it can't get as much so without wasting any more time let's jump on the computer and I'll show you how to do it so we're doing this on Windows 11 but Windows 11 collects just about as much Telemetry as Windows 10 there's really not a big difference between the spying from Windows 10 and the spying from Windows 11 it's it's pretty close so most of the settings that I'm going to show you how to change you can do this in Windows 10 as well but to start out with we're going to jump into our settings here so go ahead and open your settings and the first place we want to go is into privacy and security right here and then we want to go into General right here and then for General the first thing you want to do is just turn all four of these off right here let app show me personalize ads using my advertising ID well we're just going to get rid of that completely let websites show me logically relevant content by accessing my language list now that's none of their business let Windows improve start and search results by tracking app launches um how about no and show me suggested content in the settings app absolutely not I don't care don't bug me so now that we've turned those off we're going to jump back into privacy and security and the next thing we're going to go into is right underneath general which is going to be speech right here and for speech mine's already turned off but I would recommend turning this off because why would we want Microsoft recording our speech yeah probably not a great idea but then again if you have Alexa or an Android phone and Google and Amazon are already doing it anyway so it really doesn't make much difference but at least we can turn it off in Windows so we're going to jump back into privacy and security the next one we're going to go into is right underneath speech which is inking and typing personalization go ahead and click on that and right here where it says custom inking and typing dictionary we're going to go ahead and turn that off now the next one we want to go into is back into privacy and security and we want to go into Diagnostics and feedback now once we come into here you'll notice that you have required diagnostic data that you have to send well I'm not really okay with that but for what we're going to do right now is we're going to go ahead and turn off the optional data then the feedback frequency which is down here at the bottom it says automatically we're going to say how about never and then we're going to go ahead and push this button right here under delete diagnostic data go ahead and hit delete and it'll delete all of your diagnostic data on your system however this is not where we're going to stay we got one more setting that we have to do as well so we're going to go ahead and click on the start button we're going to type in reg edit go ahead and open the registry editor here and then once it opens where we're going to want to go is we want to go into local machine then we're going to want to go into software then from software we want to go down to policies right here and then from policies we want to go into Microsoft and then we want to pick windows and then from Windows we want to go down to where it says data collection now in data collection what we're going to want to do is we're going to want to create a dword name here so you rightclick go new and we're going to want dword 32-bit value and then you just want to Simply type in allow Telemetry and then go ahead and hit enter and then from there you want to open this up and then just change it to zero it should be Zero by default and then go ahead and hit okay now at this point in order for this setting to take effect you'll have to restart your computer however once you restart this section right here where it says you are sending required diagnostic data will be disabled so it'll disable all Diagnostic and feedback so instead of rebooting right now we're just going to move on we're going to go back into privacy and security and then we want to go down to activity history and then from activity history we want to go ahead and disable both of these settings mine the second ones send my activity history to Microsoft is already disabled however the store my activity history on this device we're going to go go ahead and turn that off and we're going to clear history as well and then the next point we're going to go back into privacy and security we're going to go into search permissions and then from search permissions we want to disable the Microsoft and work accounts right here honestly you shouldn't be using a Microsoft account anyway in fact that should have been my first tip if you don't want Windows spying on you the first thing you should probably do is not use an online account on your computer because I can't help you there you know so I would turn your Microsoft account into a local account and I would do that from the very beginning and then once you scroll down here where it has history I would turn off history right here and clear the device search history and then we want to scroll down here to where it says more settings where it says show search highlights it says see Contex suggestions in the search box go ahead and disable that one too and then from here we're going to go ahead and jump back to privacy and security and we're going to go down to our location right here and at this point we're going to talk about all of these different settings that we have down here from location to camera to microphone all of these are right here so we're going to jump into location first now one thing you can do is for location services you can just turn it off completely but if you're using an app like for instance if you're getting the weather cuz right now weather well I T personally haven't turned off but you could turn on the location data for your weather if you want to have localized weather but if you're not concerned about any of this stuff right here what you could do is go through by a case by case basis and turn off all of these different permissions here or you can just turn it off in general and if you go back to privacy security you can do the same thing for camera you can go through and you can tell which games or which apps that you want to have access to the camera or you can just turn it off now I think some of the most important ones would be location camera and microphone now for this one right here when it comes to camera and microphone I would highly recommend turning these off completely especially if your P privacy concerns you because you know companies like Facebook and others have been known to listen to your microphone in order to get advertising suggestions and to be honest with you I don't want companies listening to me when I'm on my computer so I'd rather just turn the permission off completely but you may need to have the camera and microphone permissions turned on if you're using any kind of program like Skype or teams or any kind of program where you need to have permissions for your camera and microphone so keep that in mind as well and when you go through this thing you can actually come down and you can go into any of these different sections that you want like voice activation and you can turn that off as well but for the most part the most important ones to look at are location camera and microphone okay so now what we can do is we can go ahead and close settings and then the next setting that we're going to play with is going to be in the registry and this is going to be disabling the search results when you click in your start menu right here or when you click into search right here how you got a lot of Internet available information like for instance if I was to search for reg edit which is something that we're going to need to run you can actually search the web for reg edit well we want to use this just locally on our computer we want to disable any kind of search history or search results from within the start menu so we're going to go ahead and open up reg edit right here and then reg edit should start at the last place that you were at and since we were in the data collection key then we're going to go ahead and jump back to the very beginning here and we want to go to current user and then from there we want to go into software and then policies and then from policies we want to go into Microsoft and then into windows and then at this point we need to create a new key called Explorer and this one already has it created so we can just go into it from this point and from here we're going to want to make a new dword 32-bit value and we want to name that value disable searchbox suggestions and then from there we want to go ahead and open this up and change the setting to one and then go ahead and hit okay and then at this point we need to restart Explorer for it to actually take effect so so we're going to close reg edit we're going to right click here go into our task manager and from task manager you just want to find Explorer on the list here so go ahead and scroll down until you find Explorer and here we go and we're going to just click on restart task and let's try that again here okay there we go all right so now we can close this now if we click on our search box you'll notice that there's no more powered by Bing or anything like that so if we search for reg edit we just get reg edit we don't get any internet search results at all so I'm going to go ahead and for the next step we need to go into our task scheduler so go ahead and click the start button and search for task scheduler and it's going to be right here and notice no internet results kind of nice huh now we want to navigate into our task schedule or Library go into Microsoft and then from here we want to go into windows and then what we're looking for is right here application experience and then also if you come down down here we got the customer experience Improvement program these are the two folders that we're concerned with now you could go through on these right here you could open up each one or rather right click on each one and just hit disable so you can go through the list not export you can go through the list and just disable them just like this and sometimes you might not have permissions to disable them so this is one of the problems that you can run into so you can disable some but not all if you can't disable it you could also rightclick and just just delete it and by deleting it that kind of disables it and if you go into this one here you can do the same thing you can just right click you can either disable it or you can delete it it's your call whichever one you want to do however Microsoft may add these things back in at different times or reenable them so by deleting them you can maybe hopefully not get them back but you know you're probably going to end up getting them back so this is something that you're probably going to want to keep an eye on after you run Windows up update occasionally just to make sure that these things are gone for good now the problem with these tasks is that there's a really good chance that when you run Windows update or especially when you do a build update that these tasks are going to be put back into the task scheduler so you're probably going to have to keep up on this and go back to it occasionally just to make sure that these tasks are actually disabled or deleted like you did in the first place so keep an eye on them hopefully they'll stay gone but chances are they probably won't but that's all you can do okay so the next point we're going to go ahead and close task scheduler and we're going to go into our services here so go ahead and open the start menu and just type in services and then from this point we're going to go through and the service that we're looking for is we're just going to go down until we see right here connected user experience and Telemetry and as you can see with mine it's already disabled so to disable this though you can always open it up and right here where it says startup type you it's probably going to be automatic on your system and if it's set to automatic I would just set it to disable push the stop button and then hit okay and it should disable it so at this point all we've really done is change settings I mean we have done some registry mods in order to turn off certain features from within Windows however one of the downsides to doing this in order to protect your privacy on Windows is that it's not permanent when you go to update Windows and especially when you do build updates a lot of these settings can be turned back back on and a lot of the little registry hacks that we did can be reverted but there is one thing that we can do that is a lot more permanent and that's modifying the host file to block all of Microsoft servers because you know if they can't connect to your computer doesn't really matter what your computer collects because it can never get to them so let me show you how to do it okay so this one's going to be really easy all we got to do is go ahead and open our browser and we want to go to GitHub I'll go ahead and leave a link in the description below where you can find this list but once you get to this page you want to go down to right here where it says Microsoft Windows Office and MSN and we want to go to the link right here that has under hosts right here because these are all going to be formatted a little bit differently like for instance if you just click on domains all you're going to see is a list of domains that we want to block that's not going to be helpful for us I mean it would but it' be a lot more work if you click on the line that says hosts right here you'll notice that it's formatted differently it actually has 000000 in front of the domain that'll make our job easier so what we're going to do you can go ahead and ignore all the stuff at the top right here all we want is right here where the host names themselves start so we're going to go ahead and click here and we're going to highlight all of these different names right here and once they're highlighted right click and hit copy and now that you're on your clipboard we can move on to the next step and that's going to be opening up Windows Explorer and we want to go into our C drive from there we want to go into windows we want to go into system 32 from system 32 we want to scroll down until you see drivers and then we want to go into Etc and then from here we'll see a file called hosts now you can't modify this file in its current location unfortunately but what you can do is you can grab it drag it out and drop it on your desktop and then from there go ahead and hit continue and then you should have your host file sitting right here on your desktop then when you double click on it it's going to ask you how you want to open it we're just going to open ours a notepad and then from here as you can see our host file is essentially empty but if we go down to where it's blank down here we rightclick and hit paste all of those different hosts have shown up in our host file right here and all we have to do is go on file save and then go ahead and close this right here and as you can see our host file now if we were to open it you'll see that it has everything that we just did and at this point what we're going to do is we're going to grab this host file and we're going to drag it back into our folder like where we we took it before go ahead and hit continue and it'll copy it over now it's a little unfortunate that we have to copy it out and then copy it back but if you don't do that it won't allow you to save the document after you modify it and at this point you can go ahead and shut this down and you can reboot your computer and you should be pretty private at that point one thing I want to add though to this right here if if you do modify your host file and you use Windows security as your antivirus you're going to notice something interesting if you click on your virus and threat protection you'll notice right here that it has a possible host file hijack well what's happening here is that Microsoft in a way to try to combat people from adding their own Telemetry servers to the host file they've actually started detecting it as a host file hijack so they'll actually try to revert your host file back in order to be able to continue to spy on you all you have to do is go ahead and click allow on device and just ignore it so unfortunately this is going to be a downside of using Windows security which is an antivirus that I actually recommend using but it's kind of a Shifty way that Microsoft's using it in order to prop up their own interests instead of the interests of the people that are actually using their software and don't want to be spied on now there are some downsides to many of these settings we just changed when it comes to privacy there kind of a balance between privacy and convenience I mean I wish there wasn't but unfortunately that's the world we live in for instance I don't even know how I lived my life without Google Maps but by using Google Maps Google literally knows where I'm at 100% of the time and don't for a second think that they're not selling that information to anyone willing to buy it so a lot of the settings that we disabled are also tied to conveniences for instance we disabled personalized advertising well we're still going to see advertising it just will be completely unrelated to anything we're interested in considering the fact that most of us completely ignore ads anyway it doesn't really matter however you might like to see the weather but if you want localized weather information then you have to tell your computer where you are that's private information that you're giving Microsoft for the convenience of them telling you if it's going to rain tomorrow so everybody has to make the decision for themselves how extreme they're going to go with their privacy settings and you also have to do this while keeping in mind that even if you go to The Most Extreme Measures possible your computer is still spying on you there's no way that you're going to completely eliminate data collection the reason why is because data collection is literally how big Tech makes its money if it wasn't for data collection there would be no Facebook there would be no YouTube Windows would still cost $100 for every new version instead of being a free upgrade the reason why a lot of the internet is free is because you're the product remember if you're not paying for the service you are the service the companies that are giving you these services for free are collecting your data and selling it everyone from advertising agencies to the government are purchasing this data that's why it's important to be in charge of your own data and you should limit the amount of data that's being collected if you can hopefully this video helped give big Tech a little bit less of an Avenue to spy on you but with all that said even services that you do pay for can sometimes treat customers badly I talk about that in this video where I discuss whether or not piracy can be justified while not advocating for piracy I kind of get why people do it as always you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 77,405

Keywords: stop big tech spying, stop Microsoft from spying, stop windows from spying, stop windows 10 spying, stop windows 11 spying, end windows spying, windows 11, windows 10, cyber security, windows 10 privacy, windows 11 privacy, make windows more private

Id: GRb3WGCfjwI

Length: 20min 54sec (1254 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 19 2024